By ten o’clock, I had stopped pretending I was working. I’d also lost track of how many employees I’d yelled at. More than normal and that was saying a lot.
Ethan was quietly working on his laptop across my office on my couch. He hadn’t brought up Saturday night, but he’d checked in several times to make sure I wasn’t self-destructing.
I checked my phone again.
Nothing.
No reply. No read receipt. No sign she’d even seen any of my messages.
I slammed my phone down on my desk hard enough, Ethan jumped, as I scrubbed a hand over my face.
“You need to give her time.” He set his laptop on the coffee table. “You might need to let her go.”
I picked up my coffee cup and launched it at his head, wishing it wasn’t empty.
Victor barged in. “Someone just took down the mirror.”
“What?” I said, already pushing back from my desk.
Victor didn’t slow down. “And my security lock is gone.”
“That’s a skeleton key to everything.”
He shot me a look. “Don’t you think I fucking know that, Reid?”
The lights flickered off, and everything shut down. A moment later, it all popped back on. Victor swept around to my side of the desk and pushed my chair back as I stepped out of his way.
In less than two minutes, he was logged in to my system. “Do you have your key?”
I was already moving. I slipped my keys from my pocket and unlocked the bottom drawer. The hidden compartment popped open, revealing the security key I rarely touched. Victor grabbed it before I could, slotted it in, and took over my system like it belonged to him.
Victor’s hands froze over the keyboard.
“That’s not right,” he muttered.
My stomach tightened. “What?”
“This access pattern,” he said slowly, “it isn’t internal.”
My blood went cold.
“It’s coming from outside the building.”
Victor’s words hung in the air between us.
“That’s not possible,” I said as my gut twisted. “The mirror was?—”
“—was intact,” Victor finished. “Until about ten minutes ago.”
The power cut again. A full sixty seconds this time. Long enough for the silence to feel intentional.
When everything came back online, my screen filled with lines of binary code, scrolling too fast to read.
“We’ve got another problem,” Ethan said as his fingers moved quickly across his keyboard.
I grabbed my laptop from my bag. “What now?”
“Someone is draining our operational accounts.”
